Archive | July, 2008

Max Erdenberger’s Posters for Change

Graphic designer Max Erdenberger created the dazzling seizure-inducing animation in Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” video, writes the always-enlightening art & design blog Viewers Like You, and just released a series of beautiful posters promoting environmental responsibilty.

Originally commissioned by eco-clothing brand NAU‘s philanthropic arm, Partners for Change, the posters never saw the light of day until Erdenberger came up with a unique solution to a very modern problem: how do you justify the unavoidably copious carbon emissions of a cross-country move?

“I already pay about $400 a year to make my family a carbon neutral family,” says Erdenberger, who recently moved 950 miles from smoggy L.A. to the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest. “The move is an especially nasty polluter.” So the designer decided to dust off his eye-popping eco-loving posters and sell them to fund the offset of his recent carbon-emission shopping spree.

“The carbon offsetting I will do with the proceeds involves calculating how much carbon is generated while transporting all our stuff in a truck, flying our family of 3 in a jet, and transporting both of our cars on the back of a semi truck. Then, selecting a organization that funds the planting of trees, and promoting alternative energy.”

The series of five posters are available for purchase on imagekind.com, with a plethora of size and paper type options to display your devotion to ecological sustainability (and good graphic design!) however you see fit. Max also recommends checking out your own carbon impact and joining the community at WeCanSolveIt.org.

Sion Sono’s Exte: Hair Extensions

Before you say anything, just stop. I know. You’re sick of Japanese horror movies– you’ve had them crammed down your throat all decade, and you’ve reached critical mass. As if their movie of the week compositions, cliché dialogue, and gaping plot holes weren’t enough, you’ve been tricked into sitting through their even duller American incarnations time after mind-numbing time. You’ve been led through the same creepy hallways and past the same undead toddlers by a parade of WB stars trying to make inroads and talented actresses slumming it for a paycheck (we may forgive you, Naomi Watts and Jennifer Connelly, but we’ll never forget).


But Exte: Hair Extensions is different! It’s a parody of J-Horror– but that’s oversimplifying matters, for this is no Scary Movie. Hair Extensions uses the horror-comedy genre as a convenient vehicle with which to deliver a diverse assortment of pure entertainment, ranging from the surface story about bloodthirsty hair extensions to an emotionally fraught drama about child abuse, to a glimpse into one adorably optimistic girl’s (Kill Bill and Battle Royale‘s Chiaki Kuriyama) dream of hair salon superstardom, and the bizarre indulgences of a necrophiliac hair fetishist. Plus, there’s a musical number. And perhaps because it’s infused with that undefinable Japanese-weird quality, it all holds together– without resorting to cheap titillation or humdrum poop jokes.
 


This one-note trailer is highly misleading.

Sion Sono, the poet-turned-auteur behind Hair Extensions, never appears in public without a black fedora, and is also responsible for a film which I count among my personal favorites: 2002′s absurdly cryptic, teeny-bopper-fearing existential gorefest Suicide Club. There too, he uses J-horror as a facade to delve into more interesting ideas, ruminating on Internet obsession, the breakdown of familial relations, media saturation and late-capitalist pop music. And he doesn’t fail to deliver on the awesomely inappropriate musical number in that film, either. Like his more famous contemporary Takashi Miike (who, incidentally, never appears in public without sunglasses), Sono works inside the skeleton of genre limitations, but seems more interested in having fun and experimenting than making sense or delivering a happy ending. Luckily for us, whoever keeps financing their projects doesn’t seem to mind.

Evan Gruzis Conjures the Dystopian Eighties

With all the venetian shades, shattered Ray Bans, and menacing palm trees in former Los Angeleno Evan Gruzis’ ink paintings, it’s no surprise that the artist lists Bret Easton Ellis as a major influence. The foreboding Eighties imagery that permeates through Gruzis’ smoggy dystopia matches Less Than Zero‘s particular brand of numbed So-Cal excess far more accurately than the Robert Downey Jr.-starring pseudo-adaptation, which turned a soul-crushing satire of Reagan-era alienation into an after school special about the dangers of narcotics.

Gruzis’ paintings also conjure the aforementioned era’s seductively vacuous reinterpretation of film noir thrillers: Michael Mann’s Manhunter, William Fridekin’s To Live and Die in L.A., Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, and Brian De Palma’s Body Double, to name a few disparate examples. It was an unsung cinematic movement marked by chaste indulgence, with gold-plated Mercedes, black velvet, and bachelor pads full of stuffy extravagance serving as a backdrop for gruff men on sexually violent missions that involved guns, broken mirrors, and synth-heavy, droning musical scores.

It all adds up to a seemingly disaffected, almost hopeless mystery. But Gruzis makes a specific point to distance himself from mere nihilist void-gazing, embedding underneath the dark sense of humor a subtle tenderness that makes his work all the more fascinating. From Fecal Face‘s fantastic interview with Gruzis:

I’m going to take a stand and say that I don’t advocate cynicism. Think about it: what does it generate other than negative rhetoric, more cynicism? I want my work to be more open than that. I treat what I do as absurdist and sometimes satirical, modes that have tradition within culture and media. These can often resemble cynicism, and it’s tricky not to cross the line. Much of my work is intentionally vapid, but I don’t intend it to be negative.

Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken on Trains, Tea and Time Travel

Emerging from an angsty, melancholy, Bright Eyes-heavy bout of introspection in my last year of high school, I had the good fortune of catching an intimate Dr. Dog show at one small venue in UC Davis’ myriad of coffee shops. Like a dark cloud parting to reveal the big bright shining sun, Dr. Dog guitar-plucked their way into my teenage soul that night, and has remained one of my favorite bands ever since. So when the chance came to do an interview with co-lead singer Scott McMicken for Mean magazine, I leapt at the opportunity.

After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, Fate, which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!

Download: “The Old Days” from the new album, Fate
[audio:drdog_theolddays.mp3]

Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical?

That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that…

Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck.

No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth.

And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.

The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album.

Have you ever hopped a train?

No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off.

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Cloud Eye Control

Imagine an expertly animated film about outer space (or a subterranean lair, or the inside of a human body) where live performers come out, interact in choreographed precision with the projected image, sing opera, and then do a disco dance on the moon with their own clones. And then suddenly the screen opens up and the performers disappear into another world, where projected light is liberated from a standard rectangular screen and matches up perfectly with an array of glowing crystals. That’s pretty much what Cloud Eye Control is, but it’s a million times radder than I can possibly describe.

A trio of Los Angeles-based artists comprised of former physics student/director-animator Miwa Matreyek, master projectionist/digital media artist Chi-wang Yang, and actress-musician Anna Oxygen (who also happened to curate Conversations That Never Happened), Cloud Eye Control explain themselves thusly:

Whether through a re-imagining of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight, the discovery of powerful crystals underground, or one woman’s interstellar search for a new home, a common theme in our stories is human adaptation in a technological world. To realize these stories, we project pre-rendered animation and live camera imagery onto various surfaces on the stage, and this imagery functions as scenery and virtual actor. Both high and low tech methods are used to allow the live actor to interact with the media. These methods range from custom-built interactive video software to the physical manipulation of video puppets.

Thanks to my friend Patrick, I happened to catch their performance at the REDCAT last night and was completely blown away. The manner in which they meld performance and video art is so complex, fascinating, and most of all entertaining, I’m pretty sure my mouth was locked in a permanent smile for the duration of their display.

I really hope they perform again soon, because I can’t wait watch it all again– but if you’re not busy tonight, I implore you to make a trip to the REDCAT at 8:30 for their final performance at the NOW Festival. Just make sure you’re prepared to loseWeight Exercise your shit.

Pixelated Nostalgia

Jesse Spears, whose job title runs something like “Draw-er of boxy cars, boobs, and sassy ladies/Vice-President of Development: Semi-Sarcastic Sentiment Division,” joined me and my fellow former child star/Mean magazine editor Mya Stark in “Little Osaka” (Sawtelle Blvd., between Olympic and Santa Monica) the other night for a delicious dinner at the Giant Robot restaurant, GR Eats. I’ve had a few different things there, and I think my favorite is the shrimp curry. Also, the veggie meatballs are like nothing else on Earth. Not to mention the mixed fries that have yams and dried banana slices in them (and I usually hate bananas!)– but I digress– I’m getting off track here.

After dinner we were wandering around Sawtelle, searching for a stationary store, when I looked up and noticed a big glowing sign on the second floor of a nondescript Japanese-style shopping center. “Pixel Memory Studio,” it read, and I couldn’t help hoping it was some sort of stealth marketing campaign/alternate reality game tie-in for a new Michel Gondry film. Actually, it was something almost as good: a Purikura shop.

But Pixel Memory Studio goes beyond the simple simulacrum of Purikura’s visual diabetes by offering a variety of Japanese video games and flashy accessories for girls to decorate themselves with: tiny dogs and shoes dangling from necklaces, lip plumper, snap-on eyelashes, cell phone charms, and creepy-snazzy artificial fingernails. Mya ended up going home with a pricey pair of bejeweled nails on her hands, with plastic bows portruding from their slick acrylic surfaces. “I’m gonna go for an evil queen look,” she gloated, before panicking at the loss of her motor skills. “Use your knuckles,” Jesse reccomended.

Conversations That Never Happened

There’s a photo of my boyfriend chucking a handful of cumquat toward the camera hanging on an art gallery wall in Chinatown, but you only have one day left to see it in person before it disappears! I know– it’s kinda short notice– but we only just got around to checking out the show ourselves earlier today, hence the untimeliness of this posting. It’s part of a photo project called Conversations That Never Happened, from the genius mind of punk legend Tamala Poljak (co-curated by the amazing Anna Oxygen).

200 portraits of Tamala’s friends and close relations make up the show, and they’re each pictured in the act of eating various foods against the uniform backdrop of Tamala’s navy blue kitchen wall. Shot over a span of two years, the images were unveiled for the first time at the Telic Arts Exchange on June 28th, arranged in a giant grid, like the biggest “MySpace Top Friends” ever. After a series of amazing-sounding dinner theater events that took place over the past three weeks, tomorrow night (July 19th) will mark the closing reception of the show, in the form of a “secret picnic café.”

Modeled after cafes in the Pacific Northwest D.I.Y. communities and historically referencing prohibition speakeasies, the café will use word of mouth to draw participants to a donation based picnic café, set up in and outside of TELIC. Paloma Parfrey will be recreating traditional picnic foods while Katie Byron reinvents what a picnic means through an installation. Performances begin @ 6pm.

Make sure to check it out before it disappears! Take a peek at a few shots of the show after the jump.

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The Echo Park Time Travel Mart

In Echo Park, there’s a store that simply sells supplies for the everyday time traveler. From medieval weaponry to robot milk (for nursing baby robots, perhaps?) and dinosaur eggs for your Jurassic jaunts, the Echo Park Time Travel Mart has got you covered– whenever you’re going.

But wait, that’s not all! It also doubles as a free youth tutoring center run by 826LA, the So-Cal branch of McSweeney’s editor/literary superstar Dave Eggers‘ national network of non-profit programs dedicated to teaching students creative writing skills. I’ve been meaning to check out the Time Travel Mart since it opened this spring, so I finally got around to stopping by last night for the opening reception of a new installation in the storefront window. Los Angeles-based artist Amy Martin created a series of five posters that use a vintage travel agency aesthetic to advertise fabulous destinations throughout history and into the future.

The posters look fantastic up close– they remind me of something Scott Hansen would post on his highly refined design blog, ISO50. Currently on sale for just $20 at 826LA’s online store or at the center itself (1714 W. Sunset Blvd), all profits go towards “helping students 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write,” says Christina Galante, the store’s retail and events manager.

After the jump, check out the stuff on sale at the Time Travel Mart, and take a closer look at Amy Martin’s (time) travel posters. (more…)

Male Odor Monsters

“Mail Order Monsters” is a totally sick action-packed, laser-blasting, tentacle-wrangling battle game for the Commodore 64. Likewise, “Male Odor Monsters” is a highly titillating, testosterone-impregnated (rationale here) new group show at Echo Park’s Hope Gallery. Teeming with the lo-fi crayon-colored psychedelia/neon childhood-nostalgic nightmare vibe that has come to dominate the experimental comics scene– and maybe avant-garde art in general– “Male Odor Monsters” features the work of Lightning Bolt drummer (and co-founder of Rhode Island’s legendary Fort Thunder) Brian Chippendale, Matthew Thurber, C.F. (a.k.a. Kites in the music world), and Kramer’s Ergot contributor Carlos Gonzales.

I was initially lured in to the show by Chippendale, whose zines I’ve become familiar with at stores like Family, Ooga Booga, and Giant Robot– but after checking out all the work, I’ve totally fallen in love with Matthew Thurber‘s adorable intensity (e.g. the endearingly terrified horse in the picture above, entitled A Degree in Time Travel). I ended up slapping down a crisp Lincoln on the first issue of his new comic book, 1-800-Mice, which reads kinda like a Sally Cruikshank cartoon watched in the midst of a Vietnam acid flashback.

Check out my photos from the show after the jump, and make sure to stop by the Hope Gallery at 1547 Echo Park Ave before August 5th to experience the odor intimately.
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Pamela Michelle Johnson

Pamela Michelle Johnson‘s enormous oil paintings of delicious fast food are unnerving the fuck out of me. They’re so intimidating in their unbearable silence, their accusatory reticence. Frozen against a foreboding background of smoky severity, Johnson’s teetering towers of seductively menacing junk exist in a world of melancholy nothingness that takes cues from the forced formality of a corporate businessman’s headshot. Alluding to both the family restaurant world’s alien extreme close-ups and the vacation-gallery art world’s eerie reverence of emotionless fruit bowls, Johnson manages to strip her inanimate subjects of advertising’s glazed-over glamour and the standard still life’s vapidity to take a look at iconic American edibles that’s equal parts uncanny and sublime.

While it’d be easy to pass Johnson’s work off as base commentary on our “Fast Food Nation,” I feel her paintings go beyond mere cautionary nutritional tales and into the murky realm of advertising’s intersection with identity. American culture (especially youth culture) is inundated with visual messages from marketers repeatedly associating cheap, unhealthy food with the concept of fulfillment and pleasure. Huge burgers and donuts are often presented taking up the whole length and width of a magazine page, or a TV screen. There’s nowhere to look outside of the Pop Tart, the cupcake: it’s everything. And after enough repetition, the message sinks in: not only is the Big Mac everything, it’s your everything. Advertisers strive to cauterize that bond, to make their cheap food products a vital part of your identity– to convince you that you’d feel empty in their absence.

Johnson’s paintings are dark caricatures of this unspoken marketing manifesto. They offer us the same familiar foods on enormous canvases– but instead of charming us into submission, these images overwhelm us with their eerie meaninglessness. Worse: they remind us of how irrevocably affixed we’ve become to their sugary, colorful, high fructose symbolism. Because no matter how menacing these towers of PBJ’s may appear, they still make me kinda hungry. Like Pavlov’s Dog, Americans have become trained to respond with an almost erotic desire towards the all-too-familiar imagery of idealized junk food. And Johnson’s totally cock-blocking that love affair, with her own highly nuanced brand of creepiness.

+ Interview with Pamela Johnson at Neotericart
+ Video interview with Johnson from Bad at Sports
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